


The Wager

by JacarandaBanyan



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies), The Avengers (Marvel) - All Media Types, The Avengers - Ambiguous Fandom
Genre: Alternate Universe - Dragons, Alternate Universe - Fantasy, Developing Relationship, Dragon Steve, Dragons, Howard Stark's A+ Parenting, M/M, Magic, Peggy is a Queen because she deserves it, Pre-Relationship, Stony Loves Steve 2018, Tony is reckless, light cuddling
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-07-12
Updated: 2018-07-12
Packaged: 2019-06-05 10:53:57
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,289
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15169142
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/JacarandaBanyan/pseuds/JacarandaBanyan
Summary: “Who are you, Traveler?”The young man stood and planted his feet like he was facing a dangerous adversary. Steve let a little tongue of flame glow to life in the depths of his throat in preparation for a fight.“Guardsdragon Steve. I am Tony Stark, and I am here to challenge you for access to your hoard.”





	The Wager

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Sunnyzhp22](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sunnyzhp22/gifts).



Steve loved flying. The landscape blurred beneath him and the wind rushed over his outstretched wings like fine silk. The sun hit the thin stretches of skin between his long, finger-like wing bones and warmed the blood there in a way that made him shudder with delight. He danced in and out of the lower-hanging clouds, sometimes falling right through a particularly thick one. High in the sky like this, he felt like he could go any direction, make any choice, do whatever he wanted. It was like there were no limits.

He always gave himself a little bit of time at the beginning of his patrols to just enjoy flying without having to pay attention to his actual duties. It was a little indulgent, sure, but what was the point of being able to fly if you couldn’t savor it?

Up ahead was the Potomaca River. Once he crossed it, he’d be out of the little stretch of land granted to him by Queen Peggy in exchange for his aerial service to her kingdom. Once he was out there, he’d have to start paying attention to the ground below him.

His patrolled the kingdom from the air like this frequently but irregularly, to keep rural brigands and crime rings from planning around his schedule. Having a dragon in the Queen’s Guard was an intimidation play at best if the outlaws he was supposed to catch could simply avoid him.

He shifted the angle of his wings and dove like a hunting falcon toward the wide river. There was a spot where the rushing waters spilled over a cliff in a spectacular waterfall that kicked up so much spray that no matter what angle the sun was at, there was always a rainbow hovering over the water. He always made a point of flying through that waterfall at the start and end of his official patrols. Sometimes he had a stealth mission and was unable to partake in his little tradition, but those missions usually fell to members of the Guard who weren’t fire-breathing winged lizards the size of crocodiles.

He pulled out of his dive and angled his body so that the curtain of water fell down the center of his long, thin body. His three right legs extended so his claws could brush against the stone wall behind the waterfall, and his left three pulled inward so the water that splashed off his back slide through his toes.

And then the water fell away and he was on the other side. He angled his wings so that he would glide at an upward angle and shook himself like a dog to get rid of some of the excess water.

His heartbeat sped up just a little once he was relatively dry and above the trees. His scales stiffened, molding his body into combat ready, aerodynamic lines, and his front two legs tensed in anticipation of an attack. Calm descended on his mind like water, and he began to patrol. 

* * *

It was a calm, crimeless day, and Steve finished his patrol quickly and without incident.

When he finally returned to his cave, however, he found that someone was already there, waiting for him. A young man sat on a flat rock near the entrance where Steve often went to sun himself in the summer. He had dark hair and eyes, but he was nowhere near big enough to be a Guardsman. A Guardsman-in-training, perhaps? But no, he was wearing fancy, well-tailored clothing instead of a uniform. A nobleman, perhaps?

The sharper cobalt blue scales that grew like spines down his back quivered in suspicion. If this young man wasn’t a Guardsman, then why was he here? He didn’t just  _ get _ visitors. He helped defend the more rural areas of the kingdom, and in return everyone but agents of the Crown left him alone. 

Perhaps he was a ruffian of some sort who’d worked out the location of his cave and was here to slay him, like some sort of knight from the Northern Kingdoms, where dragons grew to the be the size of castles? He wasn’t carrying any obvious weapons, but that didn’t mean he wasn’t hiding a blade under his clothes. 

Steve extended his wings to display his full size as he approached his mystery visitor. He let his head bend forward so his soft white underbelly would present less of a target to any hidden blades. 

“Who are you, Traveler?”

The young man stood and planted his feet like he was facing a dangerous adversary. Steve let a little tongue of flame glow to life in the depths of his throat in preparation for a fight.

“Guardsdragon Steve. I am Tony Stark, and I am here to challenge you for access to your hoard.”

The tongue of flame flared bright enough that this  _ Tony _ could definitely see it through his thickly-scaled throat and the scales along his spine stiffened into tough spines that he knew from experience could cleave through human-made armor. His tail swished in agitation.

He tore through his memories, searching for a time when he’d heard the name Tony Stark before. Who was this mere mortal who came to challenge him?

It didn’t matter. He had been challenged, and now he must meet that challenge. 

“I assume you know the rules of challenging dragons?” He hissed at Tony. Sparks fluttered between his teeth like fireflies. “What will be the nature of the challenge?”

Tony lifted his head defiantly in the face of his bared teeth and fire, and Steve grudgingly admitted that his confidence was admirable. 

“Chess. I assume you have a board?”

The toes on all six of his feet curled, leaving curved slash marks in the ground beneath him. Perhaps what he’d thought was confidence was merely arrogance. The thought of those hands running over the hand-carved ivory of the pieces or resting his hands on the obsidian and marble board, smearing their pure surfaces with oils and dirt from his skin- it made him want to lunge across the scant space between them and pin the arrogant boy to the ground with his claws. Instead he just whipping his tail back and forth with enough force to score a deep scratch in a nearby tree. 

Each piece in his hoard was special. No mere pretty cloth or sharp-edged gem could qualify, unlike some of the smaller, tea kettle-sized dragons that lived in the underbrush of the southern forests. For him to assume that Steve would just produce such a valued item at Tony’s whim was a hair’s breadth from being a forfeit-worthy insult. 

“How dare you demand to touch a piece of my hoard without first besting me in your challenge?

Tony raised his hands in that infuriatingly delicate way that noblemen did in Queen Peggy’s court. Perhaps that was where he’d seen Tony before. It made sense now. Some nobleman’s pompous son decided that he could take on the dragon of the Queen’s Guard. Maybe he had a bet with some other spoiled noble youths with nothing to occupy their time but rich food and fashionable clothes. Maybe he was one of those incredibly sheltered courtier who thought he was  _ so smart _ , and came of his own volition in search of a trophy. He seemed like the type, especially given the nature of his chosen challenge. 

“Hey now, I won’t touch it! I don’t even have to see it. I sort of came here in a hurry, so I couldn’t bring one of my own. But so long as you have one, I can just picture the board in my head and tell you what moves to make on my behalf. No touching necessary!”

“Very well,” Steve growled. “And what is your wager?”  _ What can you possibly offer in exchange for access to my hoard?  _

“I wager myself.”

“And if I don’t want you here?”

“Then as I can act as an agent of yours. A go-between for dealing with the Court or the army, someone to go collect things for you, whatever it is you need someone to do on your behalf.”

Steve’s tail lashed to the side so hard it shattered the top off of the rock it collided with. That was a troubling wager. 

“Do I understand you correctly in that you intend to offer your freedom as your wager?”

“Yes.”

And there was that straight-backed, chest-puffed arrogance again. They probably taught that posture in special classes catered to noblemen-to-be. The desire to rip his fine clothes to shreds with a sword-swipe of his front claws burned in Steve’s chest like a roaring flame. 

“How typical of your kind to assume normal people want another creature’s freedom as some twisted sort of payment.”

“I’m sorry, did you just call yourself a normal person?” Tony asked. “Guardsdragon Steve,  _ you are a hundred-year-old dragon with a privileged position in her Majesty’s Guard. _ What do you know of normal people?”

Steve let a tiny tongue of flame lick between his teeth into the open air. Tony continued undaunted.

“And I read up on the rules of challenging a dragon, so you wouldn’t be able to trick me. It doesn’t matter very much whether you want my freedom or not, just that whatever I offer you is sufficiently valuable compared to whatever I challenge you for.”

Steve settled back on his hind legs a little. 

“Very well. Perhaps it will do your fellows at the Royal Court good to see you lose your liberty on an ego trip.”

Tony stared defiantly into his eyes. 

“Bring it on.”

* * *

Steve retrieved his chess board from deep within his lair and set it up just inside the cave, where Tony couldn’t see it or touch it.

“As challenger, I believe the opening move is yours, Tony.”

And so the game began. 

Tony was good. More than good, he was fantastic. Steve was a hundred years old, he should have had the advantage of many more games played, of patience, or strategy, but Tony proved to be a worthy opponent. 

Halfway through their game, he had to reassess his assumption that it was arrogance and not confidence that brought Tony all the way out here. These were not the moves of a bored young noble, however well-trained they might be. Steve could have defeated any of them easily, and none of them would ever have played without being able to see the board. 

“Why is it, Tony, that you wish to access my hoard? What could I have that you could possibly want?”

Many, many things, but there was no way Tony could no that. Only three living humans had been inside his cave and seen his hoard; two of them, Bucky and Sam, were in the Queen’s Guard with him, and the third was the Queen herself. Not even the Queen’s Consort, Princess Angie, had been inside. If he had had to guess who among the Court would want access to his lair, he would have guessed Natasha, the Queen’s Spymaster, but she had always remained outside his cave on the occasions when she had come by. None of those people would have told anyone at Court about what they saw inside, so what could Tony possibly be looking for?

“I don’t really care about most of it, to be honest,” Tony replied. “It’s your library that I want to see. I heard it’s enormous.”

“And you don’t have a library in the Court?”

Tony scrunched up his nose in distaste. “You thought I was a member of the Court? Hell no. My father would love to be, spends every waking minute trying to buy and maneuver his way in, but either the Queen grants him lands or the Stark family marries up, we’re still just really wealthy merchants.”

That was a surprise.

“Perhaps I should have guessed. You play too well for a nobleman.”

“Yeah, well, it’s an stereotypically aristocratic game, right? Of course my father made me learn. He’s been grooming me for a long time. Gets real annoying when he ‘let’s it slip’ that he has more money than most actual Court members for the hundredth time, but he’s been like that as long as I can remember.”

“And your father couldn’t buy his own books with all that money of his?”

Tony sighed. “Could, sure. Would? No, not when he can spend it on throwing lavish parties to suck up to actual nobles. And the Court Library is for Court members only. The public libraries in the capitol suck, there’s too many people and not enough books, so here I am. Now move your knight so I can kill it.”

* * *

Perhaps Steve was distracted by Tony’s bright personality, but in the end he lost the game. When Tony triumphantly strode into the library, however, he didn’t feel quite as on edge as he would have had it been someone else.

Tony played well, and competence combined with confidence had always been Steve’s downfall. It had been what convinced him to work with Queen Peggy, and what had endeared Sam and Bucky and eventually Natasha to him. And now, watching as Tony devoured the last remaining copy of famous mathematician Iagrin Managrabluh’s magnum opus, he privately admitted that it had already left him smitten with Tony.

* * *

Tony seemed to take his chess victory as permission to move right in. Steve wasn’t against the idea, but he did wonder why Tony was so inefficient about it. Perhaps it was different for humans, but Steve wouldn’t have wanted his hoard to be split between two different caves at once. Just thinking about it made the ghost of irritation shiver down his spine.

The second time Tony had gone to the library, he’d brought a bag with him. It was roughly the size of a saddlebag, and it swung from its long strap against his thighs like a branch in the wind when he walked. It had been mostly full of paper to take notes on and little bottles of ink, but at the bottom had been a bunched-up pile of blankets. At first, he’d thought the blankets were to help hold the delicate, clear bottles so they wouldn’t break and cause the ink to flood his bag and destroying his hard work, but he quickly realised they served another purpose. After many hours of uninterrupted study, Tony had pulled the blankets from his bag and constructed a little nest, like he was some sort of bird, and fallen asleep. Hours later he’d awoken, shuffled back over to the bookshelves on his knees, and gone back to his study.

When he left, he did not take the blankets with him.

Soon he had clothes, pillows, pens, ink bottles, and tools of all sorts tucked away in Steve’s cave. When Tony wasn’t around, which was becoming an increasingly rare occasion, he would constantly stumble over a blanket sized for a human frame rather than a dragon wadded up in the corner or a sheet of notes in Tony’s handwriting tucked between his books.

It wasn’t that he minded. On the contrary, since losing to Tony he’d only grown more and more smitten with his incredible mind, his sense of wonder at his library, and his respect for Steve and his boundaries. Steve was even beginning to wonder if Tony might be worth attempting a shape-changing spell for. Tony would need more… human company eventually, right? These days, whenever he stumbled across a stray blanket of Tony’s his eyes strayed to the old, dusty shelf full of witches’ books and magical lore in the very back of his library. 

When he started noticing human hygienic tools like brushes and balms in little jars, he had to ask. 

“I know you are rich, Tony. You said yourself that your father has more money than most noblemen. Why then do you practically live in a drafty cave miles and miles from the capitol?”

Tony smiled wide and carefully marked his place in an ancient book on medical practices and advances in the far-off Green Empire, written by the famous Doctor Banner. 

“I see you’ve caught me. I was hoping if I moved in slowly enough, you wouldn’t notice.”

“Don’t you ever go home?”

“Nope.” He popped the ‘p’ and looked very proud of himself. “I ran away.”

Steve didn’t really have any eyebrows to raise, which was a shame, but he could sit imperiously on his hind legs and fold his front and middle ones, which put him in the perfect position to eye Tony imperiously.

“Oh?”

Tony looked very pleased with himself.

“Yep. Remember how my father really wants to become a noble? Well, it doesn’t look like Her Majesty is going to make him one in the near future, so he decided to marry into the title. Using me. He informed me that he had selected a bride with an ancient and prestigious but deeply indebted noble family, and that we would be married within the month. I was furious, but then I actually  _ met _ her. God, Sunset was a spoiled brat. She was rude to everyone, spent money like she didn’t even realize she was in debt, and openly told me that she didn’t care about any of my interests.

“Well, I couldn’t marry  _ that _ , but there was no way out of it. But then I remembered that the Queen had a dragon in her service, and that she took your rules and conditions for being in her employ very seriously. So I decided to come here and challenge you. You didn’t think I just showed up, miles from the capitol to challenge you without any assurance that I’d get what I wanted, did you? I had no way to know how skilled you were beforehand. For all I knew, you had studied chess your whole life and were better than anyone alive.

“So I wagered my freedom to make sure that even if I lost, things worked out in my favor. I win, I get access you your hoard, and by extension your cave. If I lost, then I had to stay here anyway because I’d pledged my freedom. And now I can’t be married off even if my father finds me, because I,” He flourished his fingers dramatically at Steve, “am under contract with  _ you _ , and the Queen will back you up.”

Steve fell back down onto all six legs and tucked his wings in so he could curl around Tony, who immediately started petting his scales with absent fingers.

“Still, your freedom is precious. What if I had been cruel, or if I had been one of those terrible dragons that cheat, or that eat their challengers before they can properly issue a challenge?”

“It was worth the risk,” Tony replied. 

Steve still thought it was a reckless wager.

“When I first set off, I filled a carriage with everything I wanted to bring, then went the horse back to the capitol. The carriage is hidden over in the woods. I’ve been slowly moving everything since the day I won.”

“Is there much left?”

“Not too much, maybe a month’s worth of casual forgetting?”

“I’ll help you move it later. If you’re going to live here, you need a proper space. It won’t do to have everything strewn about willy-nilly.”

They sat together, Tony reading and Steve admiring him while contemplating more seriously now those shapeshifting spells. He had been alone for a long time. Perhaps… well. Best not to get ahead of himself yet. He hadn’t even dug out the spell yet.

“I hope you know I’m going to hoard you so hard,” he whispered to Tony. 

“Good.” Tony whispered back, eyes still on his book. “That was the idea.”


End file.
